Dr Toby Burrows, Principal Librarian, The Scholars' Centre, The University of Western Australia, Nedlands 6907 W.A. (tburrows@library.uwa.edu.au)

Paper presented at the CAUSE in Australasia Conference, Melbourne, 11-13 July 1994

My aim today is to tell you something of a recently-established service of the Library at the University of Western Australia. The service is known as the Scholars' Centre. It operates from the second floor of the main Library building - the Reid Library - and has a staff of seven, including two senior librarians.

The Scholars' Centre is one aspect of our Library's attempt to address three major imperatives affecting our services. The first of these is the proliferation of resources in electronic forms, particularly - but by no means entirely - through the Internet. The second is the need to focus Library services more precisely and effectively in a time of severe constraints on resources, especially in relation to the acquisition of printed materials. And the third imperative is the requirement to contribute to the University's efforts to maximize the quality of its teaching and research. In the jargon of the business world, each university needs to find its market advantage and to identify its marketable strengths. The university library has an important contribution to make to this process.

As a response to these imperatives, the Scholars' Centre is a mixture of the old and the new. It is designed to integrate traditional services, like the provision of collections and study areas, with the latest developments in electronic resources and document delivery. The focus is on providing this integrated range of services to academic staff and postgraduate students in the arts and social sciences.

The "traditional" services of the Scholars' Centre are just as much a part of its charter as the newer services are. For a start, the Centre is a space, an enclosed study area with seats for two hundred readers. Some of these are accommodated in lockable private study rooms, or carrels, each of which seats two or three people. Other readers can use purpose built desks with a large lockable drawer. These desks - like the carrels - can be booked for a year at a time by eligible postgraduate students. There is also standard unreserved seating. The Centre also contains a seminar room and a reading area with armchairs. The total area, including staff space is about 1000 square metres.

An essential feature of the study area in the Scholars' Centre is that access to it is restricted to academics, postgraduates, and visiting scholars. The Centre is fully responsible for the Library's services to about 160 academics and 290 higer-degree students, and partly responsible for services to another 160 academics and 350 higher-degree students. In theory, any academic or higher-degreee student of the University may use the study area in the Centre. There is already pressure from Honours students, who are not currently eligible, to use the study area.

We plan to install as soon as possible a keycard access system, with cards issued only to eligible categories of people. For the moment we are having to rely on an honour system, which is less than satisfactory.

These study facilities have already proved popular, and there have been favourable comments about the quiet atmosphere and the level of security.

Another important traditional service provided by the Scholars' Centre is in the field of building research collections. The Centre contains the Library's microform collections, which are substantial and particularly strong in historical materials, and also the Library's special collections: rare books, manuscripts, theses, and collections of Australian literature and University of Western Australia materials. The staff of the Scholars' Centre supply the specialist services needed for the exploitation of these collections, which are essentially for research purposes.

The Centre also has an important role in selecting books and periodicals for the Library's main open - access collections. With an appropriate share of the acquisitions budget, the Centre is responsible for collection development at the postgraduate and research level in the arts and social sciences, within the broad framework of the Library's published Collection Development Policy and the Conspectus analysis on which that policy document is based.

As well as this, the Scholars' Centre has the predominant responsibility for providing a traditional inter-library loans service. All inter-library lending is managed through the Centre. Inter-library borrowing has been partly decentralized to the Library's subject libraries, but the Scholars' Centre still carries out all borrowing in non-scientific subjects. Also based in the Centre is the courier service which provides a co-operative inter-library loans system for Perth's four public universities and for several hospital and government department libraries.

These, then, are the services of the Scholars' Centre which are traditional in their origin: physical study facilities, collection building activities, and inter-library loans. In addition, the Centre is expected to provide an in-depth reference and consultancy service to its user groups.

But it is the realm of electronic services which gives the Scholars' Centre its distinctive character, and brings it within the orbit of the interests of a conference like this one. The Centre is charged with promoting and publicizing electronic resources. We aim to do this through a mixture of formal presentations to relevant groups, advice and consultation with individuals, and written material in publications like the Library's regular newsletter. Also in the pipeline is a proposal to set up targeted electronic mailing lists within the University. Indeed the Scholars' Centre recently sent its first news bulletin out by electronic mail to over 120 clients in a dozen departments.

There is a strong component of training in these activities. While we have not yet considered offering fee based courses, this may be a possibility for the future. For the present , though, we intend to concentrate on basic introductory training within the University, covering the essential elements of Internet access and networked resources in the arts and social sciences. Resources which are not networked, like those on CD-ROM, are also promoted, and training is provided in their use.

These promotional and training activities are as much for Library staff as for Library users. The staff are generally enthusiastic about electronic resources, but their ability to keep up with the latest developments on the Internet is limited by time constraints and pressure of other tasks. The Scholars' Centre is intended to provide a focus and leadership in this area, by monitoring developments, publicising them and training Library staff. Needless to say, this is a substantial undertaking, and one for which we can never find enough time! But the kind of things we have been doing includes coordinating publicity for the free trial of RLG's Eureka earlier this year, and organizing seminars for the Library's reference librarians on Internet applications.

Allied with this orientation towards promotion and basic training is a programme of consultancy and advice in using electronic resources, directed at postgraduate students and academic staff. This centres around assisting individuals from these groups to choose electronic resources of specific value to their research topic. In some situations this help can be conveyed in response to an approach from a Library user. In others, we are trying to anticipate the user's needs by forwarding relevant information to him or her as it comes to our attention. For example, the announcement of a new Internet resource in a field like women's studies can easily be forwarded to appropriate users. This process requires an infrastructure of "client files" which record individual research interests, as well as the e-mail groups I've already mentioned. In the future we will be investigating the use of an Internet server like the University CWIS as another means of delivering this kind of information.

In this kind of consultancy and training work, electronic resources are still embedded within the traditional framework of in-depth reference services. We try to treat the full range of sources - printed and electronic - as an integral whole. But our particular emphasis is, of course, on the electronic, networked materials.

One of the key elements of this is the extent to which academics and students can discover and use these resources for themselves. This is one of the crucial differences between the world of on-line searching and the world of the Internet (as well as the cost to the user, of course!). We aim to encourage users to explore these resources for themselves. The developments in end-user searching being marketed by OCLC's First Search, RLG's Eureka, ABN's SOFI, and the CAUL Current Contents service help to make this goal a much more feasible one.

As part of this process of what I suppose we must call "empowering" our users, we are also providing the facilities to enable them to connect to the campus network and the Internet. All the carrels and many of the desks in the Scholars' Centre have been fitted with the appropriate cabling and sockets for network connection. Users can then plug their own computers into these sockets. For reasons of network security, these so-called "wet desks" currently offer only serial connections. In other words, users cannot run client software like Mosaic or Turbogopher on their machines. But they can log into network servers and use the basic "line - browse" software.

The Scholars' Centre does not assign passwords for access to the campus network. Students using their computers in the Centre must approach either their faculty computing office or the University Computing Service for a password. But we provide the physical infrastructure to give these students reliable network access.

In the case of academic staff, they are much less likely to need this kind of service from us. Their network access is from their study or office, and they have faculty computing support to call on for technical assistance. Nevertheless, technical issues are sometimes inextricable from resource discovery issues, and may arise in the course of individual or group discussions with academic staff. In such a situation, we have to make a judgement as to whether we attempt to give technical advice, call on the Library's Systems staff for help, or refer the academic staff member to their faculty computing office.

Within this general framework of physical facilities and promotion and training, there are specific electronic services which we offer to clients of the Scholars' Centre. In many ways these are like a new overlay on to the core services which Libraries have always offered. An appropriate analogy might be the diagrams in encyclopaedias which consist of a basic illustration of the human body with a series of coloured plastic overlay sheets. The electronic services of the Scholars' Centre are, as it were, an overlay onto the previous range of library services. One of the most central of these is what we might call bibliographic tools on CD-ROM, for example: union catalogues like Serials in Australian Libraries, indexing tools like the Periodicals Contents Index, and abstracting tools like Dissertation Abstracts . We also offer mediated access to the bibliographic databases and catalogues which are available over the Internet, through such frameworks as Hytelnet, Gopher and World Wide Web. And we provide standard a on-line search service through the commercial vendors like Dialog, BRS, OCLC and RLG. For these, we normally recover our costs from our users, though we are keen to promote CAUL's programme of subsidized national access to services like OCLC and RLG.

Closely allied with this is our orientation towards electronic reference services. The Scholars' Centre has, in fact, no printed reference sources in the conventional sense, so reliance on electronic sources is essential. While we are unlikely to get many of the very specific, factual type of reference queries, we are ready to answer these all the same, using sources available freely over the Internet. But our focus is on the more wide-ranging, in-depth kind of request, where we can explore with the client the full range of sources available in their field of research or study. Here, too, our first resort is to the Internet and to material available on CD-ROM. Commercial databases can also be searched, though we are obliged to recover our costs from the user for these services.

We are prepared to receive and reply to reference queries by electronic mail, though as yet this service has not been advertised or promoted. But we certainly envisage an electronic reference service as a key element of the Centre's services and this is one of our priorities for development in the near future.

Document delivery is another area where the Scholars' Centre has an important role. For the past 2 1/2 years the Library has been offering a document delivery service known as IRIS, to academics and postgraduates in the faculties of Science, Agriculture, Medicine and Dentistry, and Engineering. Funded originally by serials cancellations, the IRIS service acquires documents on demand from the major American and European vendors like UnCover, Article Express, and the Genuine Article. There is no cost to the user; all costs are met by the Library. The service is proving very popular, and no wonder - it is far quicker than conventional inter-library loans. 83% of articles requested from UnCover, for example, arrive by fax within two working days. The technology is a mixture of electronic ordering and delivery by fax. But our Mathematics and Physical Sciences Library recently took part in a successful experiment by Article Express to deliver an article by electronic mail.

The Library has now received funding to extend the IRIS service to the remaining faculties: Arts, Economics and Commerce, Education, and Law. The funds have come from the university's share of the grants earlier this year under the Quality Assurance programme. The Scholars' Centre will be responsible for this part of the IRIS document delivery service. We see it as a very marked improvement over our conventional inter-library loans system.

The whole IRIS document delivery project is a significant shift away from local ownership of printed materials. On the other hand, however, the Scholars' Centre is actively collecting electronic texts for local storage. At present, our focus is on CD-ROM versions. We have, for example, the English Poetry set published by Chadwyck - Healey, containing searchable texts of thousands of English poems from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries. Another CD-ROM contains a French dictionary, Le Robert, and the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM is about to join it in our collection. Further dictionaries and other texts are under consideration.

At the same time we are beginning to investigate the requirements for setting up an electronic text archive, along the lines of those at the University of Virginia, Indiana University, and the Oxford Text Archive. There are many issues to be considered, among them the storage format and the access software. What kinds of texts should be collected is also important; Classics and English literature are an obvious choice, but I would be keen to develop a collection of Australian texts in electronic form.

Another major project in which the Scholars' Centre is likely to play an important part is to design and implement an appropriate framework for access to subject-based resources on the Internet. Several different models are possible. The University Computing Service currently runs a Campus-wide Information Service through a Gopher server. The Library may work directly on the structure of Internet access embedded in this server, or we might consider establishing our own Gopher server and link it to the University CWIS. An alternative is to develop a World Wide Web server, either in the Library or for the University as a whole. This may have advantages in publishing our own local material onto the Internet. Whatever course is followed, the Scholars' Centre is concerned with finding a solution which will allow us to organize Internet resources into a structure which is relevant to the needs of our

clients.

These, then, are the kinds of electronic services which are offered and planned by the Scholars' Centre. Underlying them are a range of serious and important issues which need to be resolved to ensure that the services are provided in an effective and relevant way. One of the more obvious of these is the question of the equipment and funds needed to provide these services. The Scholars' Centre has been fortunate to receive considerable funding during the recent refurbishment of the Reid Library building and the installation of a new computer system.

But continuing funding - whether for more equipment, new databases, or specialised staff - is much harder to come by. It seems to me that our goal should be to make the electronic services free to the user as far as possible. This principle is embodied in the IRIS document delivery service and the CAUL Current Contents service. And, of course, most of what is available on the Internet is free at the point of use, at least for the time being. But there is a definite limit on the extent to which the Library can subsidize searches on services like First Search or Eureka. It is too early in the existence of the Scholars' Centre to say whether alternative sources of funding - such as sponsorship - will have to be investigated. But the Library's success in obtaining a share of the quality assurance funds shows that the University is prepared to fund innovative projects aimed at improving the effectiveness of research and scholarship.

A second important issue revolves around the nature of the electronic information itself and the equipment it requires. How should our choice of software platforms, computer equipment, and network infrastructures be determined? If we standardize on a single approach in all these matters, this will undoubtedly simplify the work of our systems support staff. But we may run the risk of being unable to provide certain important resources or facilities which are incompatible with what we already provide. And our preferred solutions may quickly turn out to be a dead end, with newer resources requiring a different software platform or different equipment. In short, we come up against all the issues of standardization, compatibility and interoperability faced many times over, already, by computing centres.

We also need to consider the appropriateness of the different electronic formats, both in general and in specific cases. Should we assemble a plethora of different formats: CD-ROMs, on-line databases, multimedia, image files, remote storage, local storage? Or should we stick to one type as far as possible? It seems difficult to avoid having all the various types of material, if we are to offer the fullest possible range of electronic resources. But the burden this imposes, in terms of the knowledge and technical expertise required, is a substantial one. There is also a much greater effort required in promotion and training, both for Library staff and for users. An eventual goal may be to use, as far as possible, a single "front-end" software package to give access to a range of different storage media.

The technical expertise required to make electronic resources available raises another important issue. With every electronic application it installs, a university library moves further into an arena previously occupied by the computer specialists. Relationships between university libraries and the campus computing offices - centralized or decentralized - need continual redefinition and elaboration.

While it is undoubtedly in the interests of the university as a whole for this relationship to be a closely collaborative one, this is often made difficult by differing priorities and differing interests. The emergence of Campus-Wide Information Systems running under Gopher or World Wide Web software has posed the question particularly clearly. Whose responsibility should it be to coordinate such a service? While computing offices have the technical expertise, the Library has the expertise in organizing knowledge into a coherent framework. A library-based facility like the Scholars' Centre has an important role to play in the development of a Campus Wide Information System, particularly in relation to the part of the system which provides a window onto the Internet. Our knowledge of Internet resources, and our ability to assess their relevance to the needs of our clients, certainly put us in a good position to advise on the architecture of an Internet server for the arts and social sciences.

The actual arrangements for delivering such a service may be realized in various ways. The Library may be assigned responsibility for part of the University's CWIS, or it may have responsibility for the whole of it. The Library may run its own Web or Gopher server linked into the University's server. Whatever model is chosen, there are many matters of governance and responsibility to be settled. These considerations can be multiplied across the whole range of electronic resources now being provided in universities, either by libraries or by computing offices or within departments.

Another cluster of important considerations relates to the extent to which we are talking about local electronic resources. Especially on the Internet there is a pressing need to decide when we should simply point to resources held remotely, and when we should store resources on a local machine. While remote storage is usually preferable, for obvious reasons of cost and disk space, it can't always be guaranteed that remote provision will continue indefinitely. There was a recent lively debate about this on the Library Gopher List. If a remote resource suddenly ceases to be available, do we simply accept this as a fait accompli? Or should the Library have taken steps to "acquire" and preserve this information for continuing local access? If so, how do we determine which resources are worth preserving and how do we justify the cost of keeping them? These are questions with which the Scholars' Centre - like many other places - is only beginning to grapple.

Similarly, we are exploring the issue of whether to "publish" our own local material onto the Internet. Among the considerations involved is what sort of material might be published, what resources would be required, and what format should be used. Should the Library even be involved in this kind of process? Or should it be left to the University administration and the academic staff? In my view, the Library has an important role here, preferably in partnership with these other groups.

In all these complicated issues, the paramount concern must be for the needs of our users. It is no use developing grandiose plans for electronic services if users don't need them! A difficulty facing us all, to a greater or lesser degree, is the wide variation among academics and students in their attitudes towards, and expectations of, information technology. This kind of variation is probably most marked among the Scholars' Centre's clientele in the arts and social sciences departments. While there are many who are knowledgeable about I.T. and comfortable with it, there are others who will only use the Library's on-line catalogue under protest, and carry out their teaching, learning and research without any other contact with computers. It is hard to convince this latter group of the benefits and value of electronic services like the Scholars' Centre, and we should avoid insulting their intelligence by decrying them as "information illiterates". Rather, we must patiently and honestly try to convey the benefits of electronic services, without denying their limitations. Above all, we need to relate these services to the methods of information searching preferred by this group of users, with the aim of demonstrating the strengths and advantages of the electronic approaches.

At the same time we need to be able to present these users with simple systems which are easy to learn and easy to use, rather than with complex and sophisticated systems which are daunting to the novice and the technophobe. Even then we must be prepared to carry out very basic training and to do much of the searching ourselves.

In the primary school social studies curriculum, children are taught that "needs" are not the same as "wants". Members of this group of users tend to want a kind of Bodleian on the Swan - the largest possible range of printed resources immediately available. But what they need is something rather different: access on demand to the fullest range of sources in their subject area. The difference is crucial. If libraries can establish methods for providing this kind of access, especially through electronic services, we can go a long way towards meeting the real needs of our scholars.

This, in essence, is what the Scholars' Centre is all about. We have a clear client focus, on academics and postgraduates in the arts and social sciences. While we offer various traditional services, our focus is on electronic services. Our aim is to integrate these electronic resources into the whole flow of knowledge and information within the University. We see promotion of these resources and encouragement in their unmediated use as a crucial strategic contribution to the university's success in teaching, learning, research and scholarship.